Your comments: Universities in N.J. are some of the costliest in the nation

Alexandra Pais/New Jersey Local News ServiceMead Hall at Drew University is shown in a September 2009 file photo. Drew University is on a federal list outlining some of the costliest universities in the country.

New federal data shows some of New Jersey's colleges and universities -- including New Jersey Institute of Technology, the College of New Jersey, Rowan University and Drew University -- are among the most expensive in the country. The U.S. Department of Education released a series of lists highlighting the colleges with the highest tuition, total costs and price increases. NJIT in Newark ranks fifth highest in the nation among public colleges for its tuition and fees. The College of New Jersey in Ewing was 11th on the list.

NJIT is a top notch engineering and architecture school with a budding school of management. The tuition may be high for a public school, but so is everything else in NJ. The quality of the education is outstanding for the cost when compared to a private school. As far as technology is concerned NJIT is ahead of the curve.

Education is now an industry with a goal to maximize profit. Given the fact that health care in the state is treated the same way it's easy to see why students will have to bear the burden of providing record profitably to both industries. It's the free market answer to shooting yourself in the foot when you have out of control price increases.

While New Jersey does provide less money to higher education than other states, the bigger is staggering costs. Since 1980, the average annual costs (tuition, fees, room, and board) at colleges has gone up around 850%, while the inflation rate has only gone up 170%. No other product or service (not gasoline, not medical costs, not housing) has shown such a staggering increase. Currently, you have hundreds of thousands of recent college grads who are an average of $24,000 in debt, and many cannot find gainful employment. Recent surveys indicate that only 30-35% of college grads under the age of 25 have jobs which require a college degree.

Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, has said that there is a higher education bubble, much like the dot-com bubble and housing bubble. The bubble is about the pop and results will be ugly. Initially a handful of colleges will fold, and then parents and students will become very afraid about paying tens of thousands of dollars to an institution which may go out of business. More affluent parents will tell their kids to pick cheaper colleges, and less affluent students may choose to go to a trade school or no school at all, thus causing a chain reaction causing more universities to go under.